The Revelation
by Laluzi
Summary: The truth was nowhere near as cleansing as he'd come to believe.


**AN: I don't own Prototype or the lines I directly took from it. **

0o0o0

_I'm not human._

_The revelation… It freed me. It killed me._

_I'm not human. Heh… Alex is just a role I play. Part of me was relieved. And part of me died. S'just another disguise, right? So ingrained… so _real_… even I believed it._

-Alex Mercer

* * *

><p>The payphone slips through shaking fingers.<p>

The world is spinning, and for once, I can feel it. It's not like clinging to a wildly spinning helicopter trying to shake me off, not like being sent sprawling from a detonating charge. Those, I can handle – can shake the disorientation from my head and spring back into the fray. Now… there's nothing. I can't see, can't sense. Can't hear anything aside from those distorted words, echoing on and on in my head.

_Sound familiar? _

_It should. You're not human. You're the Blacklight virus…_

Alex Mercer. My name. _Myself_. I try to take a step away from the phone booth, and I pitch forward, stumbling. All a lie. All another goddamn lie in this web of lies and world of lies. Why the hell do I even _try_?

This face. This life. Trying to regain memories of a past that was never there. All I could find were flashes, broken strings of images that belonged to a brain that wasn't really my own.

Blacklight. Not just a project anymore. Not just a virus. Not even something inside me. It's too close, so close that I can't discern where it ends and I begin, even if I try. I can see the truth now – there's no escape.

_The goal was to engineer a version that could copy and combine genetic traits to rewrite living creatures…_

It's what I do, isn't it? Consume someone, preserve their genetic information, and reform myself into a perfect replica. Draw them into myself, adding their memories and DNA to an endless store. I kill them… and rebuild myself into them.

How did I not realize that _I_ was a replica?

Panic strikes. If I'm not Alex Mercer, then who _am_ I?

It frightens me that I can't find an answer.

What if Blackwatch was right? 'Mercer isn't a he, it's an it.' What if I'm less than _that_? I'm not even Mercer. Just a recreation, a shadow. A virus, another one of the monsters infesting the city.

I'm not ready to give that up, even though I know it to be a lie. It's all I have left.

The worst thing is, I think I already knew. These comforting notions of humanity, a cure, a life to return to – they fall away like withered leaves. This knowledge shears away beliefs that had crumbled and died long ago, and I was clinging to the ashes because I couldn't imagine how to face what I'm forced to see now.

_But you're alive…_

Am I? I cast a wild glance around the daylit Manhattan streets, as if reaffirming that they're still there. They are, and even in the more peaceful area I stand in, I can see the scars of some past battles - broken windows, bullet holes, boarded up buildings. The proof of my existence is stamped all over this godforsaken place. I exist... but am I alive? I can see and hear and breathe and feel, but am I _really?_ How can I be alive when I don't know who _I_ am within myself, when I don't even have my own identity?

_You're the Blacklight virus…_

That isn't a name; it's a title, a label. Something scrawled on a sticky note attached to a petri dish. Even Zeus is more of a name than this.

Dana, in Ragland's morgue – still, save for the rise and fall of her chest. I'd held onto her last coherent words like a life preserver – "_Look, whatever happens, you're still my brother._" Another lie. Things had happened, but they hadn't needed to. That promise had been broken before it had been put into words – been formed, even. We'd been lying to each other – and _ourselves _– from the moment I found her being assaulted in her apartment. If she isn't really my sister, does that mean she doesn't matter? Is she just another person to ignore or shove aside, to hunt for information or consume for survival?

But she's not, and even thinking about her like that makes me feel sick. Yet the alternative is hardly any better. If we're not family, then what ties _her_ to _me_ – something infinitely below her, a diseased monster created from her real brother's body? What happens when I'm _not_ still her brother? When she finds out the one she loved and cared about was dead? Somehow, this hurts more than anything else – it burns me so badly I can't even think about it. Can't bear it, not yet.

The strength, the speed. Running up walls. Tearing apart armored vehicles, shifting every cell and rewriting my active genetic code in mere seconds. Things I tried not to think too deeply about – I hadn't wanted to work out the answers after all, had I? Things that humans couldn't dream of, things that science decried in an endless mantra – it was all impossible. Muscles couldn't hold up against that kind of force, tissue couldn't be grown at will. A body couldn't survive high velocity impacts from massive heights, much less shrug them off.

_Sound familiar?_

It does – it all does. In retrospect, the answer is obvious. Humans couldn't do these things. I was no special exception to this rule – it just didn't apply to me. I had limitless power that transcended human possibility because I had never been one. Never even come close.

For a brief moment, I wonder who the contact is – why the hell was he helping me, why did that voice sound oddly familiar through the obvious distortion? But I realize I don't care. It doesn't matter who he is. I don't care how he knew what he knew. I don't even need to verify it. I can _feel_ the truth. It's been crawling inside of me the whole time.

The rest of his intel pales in comparison to this crushing knowledge; a routine mission, another stretch of subterfuge that was probably going to end up in explosions and gunfire. He'd wanted me to commandeer a transport, play the part of a pilot – get into a Blackwatch meeting. Okay. It doesn't matter at this point. I'm headed towards the landing pad he pointed me towards, but it's totally mechanical – breathing in and out, placing foot after foot, winding through the seething hordes of pedestrians with uncharacteristic slowness. I'm barely paying attention.

I'd been right and wrong. This single-minded quest to get to the bottom of my origins, of the virus… The truth is purifying. What I hadn't realized was that it purifies with flame, stripping away all of those unquestioned falsehoods with sheets of white-hot fire. Tearing apart all those things I never even _considered _I would lose, _could_ lose, ravaging and ravaging until it feels like there's nothing left but a hollowed-out shell.

This body… it's just another disguise. Why did I never doubt it before? If I can wear the cast-off skins of so many others like costumes to take on and off, who was I to think that one of them might actually _belong_ to me? There was nothing to set it apart from the rest, other than being the first. Like the first set of clothes I had worn, nothing more. Mine, but not _me_.

I blindly shove some straggling people out of my way. Not human. Nothing like them.

But suddenly, I can't take it anymore – can't stand another second in this crowd. It's suffocating. Too much heat and noise, and I'm inexplicably furious with it – furious with all of them for existing, for hating me, for having the curse and privilege of being actual people. I can feel the snap coming on, and I still don't want to face it, even though I know… what? That killing them doesn't mean anything, because I'm further estranged from them than they are to ants on an evolutionary scale? Maybe that's the case, but they're inside me too, and I can't… I'm not ready to see what's on the other side of that divide.

So I spring up, rocketing several stories away from the pavement. They panic and scream. I can't care. Not human.

My head isn't any clearer up here, but at least I have some space and the biomass has stopped trying to break free of my arms. Sometimes I can't even tell if it's hunger or rage that makes me want to lash out and strangle the stupid, pathetic, inconceivably lucky idiots around me. I pause for a moment, then call it back – watch the black, ropy tendrils crawl over my jacket. This is me. This is what I _am_. Beneath this skin, beneath the face that was nothing more than another means of self-denial, I'm… _this_. I can't look away anymore, can't write off my powers as the product of an experiment gone awry. _I'm_ the experiment.

I let the biomass slither back inside where it belongs – it had never bothered me before, but suddenly I don't want to look at it, my flesh in its purest form. I'm stuck in the abyss between delusion and acceptance – I know now that that final bridge between myself and the rest of the world is gone, that pointless hope that I might have a life after the catastrophe ended – the hope that this three-way war might _have_ an end at all – was just that, an empty dream. But could I have taught myself to be human – could I have convinced myself through blind belief? Because I'm human enough to be afraid of what I'll become if I let go.

There's nothing to do but keep moving – keep running, pretend the finish line's in sight. If this war is going to be my life, I guess I have to get used to it.

Maybe I can, though. Humanity is one jumbled mess of senseless confusion, but from what I can see, people aren't made to kill. They're stupid, petty assholes for the most part, but when it comes to taking lives, they fall short. They can act tough and plan death on grand scales from afar, but when they've got to do the act themselves, they unravel. If they can't convince themselves that their enemies are miles beneath them, not people like themselves, they drive themselves mad. Sometimes they do both at once. I've lived it a hundred times over through Blackwatch's psychotic laughter in my head.

I can do more. I can slaughter and _see_ the truth, see every detail of the lives I reap. No justifications, just death. Maybe I don't like it, but I can live with it. I can handle this _because_ I'm not human.

I had wondered why I could kill; could kill and feed and destroy and not hate myself for it. After the first few times, I realized that I didn't feel anything – nothing other than what I told myself I should feel. Beneath that gnawing assumption of guilt, there was nothing. Just darkness. And I was afraid of that, so I barricaded off that yawning chasm with what I thought I should have felt, with how I'd certainly be _able _to feel once death ceased to become commonplace.

Stealing a helicopter, slaughtering a pilot and his guards. It's the end of someone's life. It's something I've done so many times before that I can't count them, even with the memoirs of each incident raging on eternally in the back of my mind. I've ripped men from a transport's cockpit and tossed them to the city far below like discarded plastic wrappers, heard them scream and cry and plead and felt no glimmer of common sympathy. I can't cry. I don't plead. I've ceased to scream – I _roar_. How could I have ever deluded myself into believing I was one of them?

In the distance, I can see a skyscraper – a wide office building that looks like the one that the informant told me about. I crane my head upwards; most of the roof is hidden from my position, but I can just see the silhouetted tips of rotary blades.

I don't feel like I'm accomplishing anything. Has anything I've done even mattered? Everything I've fought for… Even if I can stop this from ever happening again, I've made my mark upon the world. I can see it wherever I go in the city, from the chaos of the red zones to the despondent fear in the areas that can still be considered safe. My legacy is nothing but destruction and death.

Just like the plague I was made to be.

But I'm not. That's not a safe thought – it's a _wrong _thought. I'm different. I have to be. I can't be just a disease, I'm not like Greene or her virus that's razing the city. Because… because…

The arguments come fast and frantic, and I realize none of them can hold up. I'm not a plague because it isn't uncontrolled slaughter that I'm doing – _what else can you call the haze of losing yourself in the battle, the dying screams of innocent in your head? _I'm not spreading, I don't want to infect anyone – _because you're too afraid to look inside and see what you really want_. I'm trying to protect – _a single person. Everyone else, you hate enough to slaughter. _I'm trying to save Manhattan – _and you really believe that? You want bloody revenge, and if you can make yourself feel like a half-decent person in the process, it's a lucky bonus._

I can think, I'm aware – _so is Greene, as she plots to engulf humanity_. I'm in control – _are you really? Have you never lost yourself to the hunger within?_

I'm not doing what they wanted me to do.

Silence.

It's not a relief, not some heroic standard I can hold myself to and justify my crimes with. But it's powerful, strong enough to give me somewhere to stand. A stretch of solid ground that I still can call my own. I have that little sliver of free will, if nothing else. Fate and destiny are just pretty words to make people feel like everything happens for a greater reason, but I at least have this much control, some means of carving out my own path in the world. I was created to be a biological weapon, a tool to wipe out swathes of lives on a commander's whim. But I follow my own whims. I'm not under their control. And I can focus my destruction, to a point – pick targets, turn myself in a certain direction. I've chosen my victims. I lash against them because I _hate_ what I was supposed to be. I hate what they wanted me to be. I hate them for _trying_ to create that. If I was just a plague, I wouldn't be capable of this sort of loathing.

I'd met the Infected and slaughtered them. Turned away from what could have been called my own flesh and blood. I had touched the Hive, felt the conglomerate and ultimate achievement of infected minds, and fought it. I'd felt the full force of their combined, uniform will, and I'd pulled away. Forced them out of my head. And hated them too – what they were, what they wanted to do.

And I don't know if it's by design or by a lucky accident, but somehow, I was made just a step above those instincts. Close enough to feel the thrill of the chase in every fiber of my body, to indulge in the hunt and the kill and always crave more. But not so close that I can't look away, can't set it aside or postpone or reject something entirely in order to work towards something else. To look to the future. I can think outside of the virus's desires. Not a slave, like Greene. Not like the rest of them.

Not like the Infected, not like humanity. Not like anyone. I'm somewhere between the two. Or I'm miles away, but still equally distanced from both. Not Alex Mercer, not a man. Not Zeus, not a god. Not Blacklight, not a disease. All of them at once, but not enough to count. And if I'm completely alone in the world, then I've won that much – achieved one of those meaningless little goals made from a mindset that seems lifetimes away.

Or maybe it hasn't changed at all. In the end, I still _am_. I always was. I was just ignorant of some of the specifics.

I see the truth now, but the lies are just so hard to let go.

Windows shatter underfoot as I race up the tower's side, shards of glass twinkling like fallen stars as they rain to earth. Alex Mercer is a stranger to me, whoever he was. He lived and got caught up in Blackwatch's game, and he died as I was born. I was never him. He was never me.

I can smell them on the rooftop – gun oil, metal, and sweat. Blackwatch troopers are guarding the gunship I'm supposed to grab. They're in my way. I hate them. I hate them enough to tear down every building in this damned hellhole of a city, enough to rip apart a patrol of tanks with my unmorphed hands. But they're still _lives_, memories and hopes and dreams that I know I'm soon about to taste…

Or are they? They made me like this – it's their fault I'm this _thing_, something revoltingly inhuman. I can drag them down to hell with me.

There's nothing to hold me back anymore. No halfhearted fetters, nothing to keep me from tumbling headfirst into the endless and blackened abyss before me.

The soldiers finally spot my approach; they turn and yell, raising their weapons. And it's like a set of chains has been ripped from my heart, the biting guilt fading after a sharp sting of remorse for the happy falsehoods I could no longer entertain. More shackles latch onto their vacancy, but they're utterly different this time. They're not tethers to the balance between life and death I know I've torn apart, but something far simpler and colder – I'm less than human. A monster, an animal. But there's a relief in this revelation. Blackwatch – there are no links between us, only the screaming memories of their fallen men. They're not my kind. We are nothing alike. I'm not human.

The relationship is finally clear, after so much needless worry over blood spilled. They're my prey.

With a roar, I dive into the darkness head-on.


End file.
